It's also a sign of the new audience that games like Candy Crush Saga have created on smartphones and tablets. On a recent train journey, I overheard two fiftysomething commuters swapping Candy Crush tips, revealing along the way that they had both a.) spent less than a tenner on the game, and b.) progressed well past level 200. You might think of them as casual gamers, but actually, many are just as hardcore in their own way as the hardest hardcore Titanfall player. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP Sweet success: Candy Crush Saga players spent $493m on virtual items in the final quarter of 2013 alone. Candy Crush Saga's audience isn't just huge: it's hugely mainstream. Even if you're not quite as aware of how much they're playing Candy Crush Saga and similar games since you figured out how to turn off their Facebook alerts begging for help. Commuters from office juniors through to CEOs. Really, though, if you want to find out why Candy Crush Saga is so popular and makes so much money, you should ask the other people: the ones actually playing it. There's something about Candy Crush Saga's success that is rubbing away at a raw nerve for many gamers. I've had this conversation a lot over the last year, often with otherwise-reasonable people who are usually more than capable of accepting that not everyone likes the same games as them. The more splenetic critics focus in on the latter point, often boiling it down to the suggestion that people who play Candy Crush Saga are stupid, easily-manipulated sheep who wouldn't know a proper game if it bit them on the nose.

At the more thoughtful end of the spectrum, they'll admit that the game is very polished and accessible, while pointing to its sophisticated psychological string-tugging to get people hooked, and paying. King's recent (and since abandoned) trademark shenanigans around the words 'Candy' and 'Saga' inflamed those critics further, as part of a wider – and frequently heated – debate about the rise of 'freemium' games, which were estimated to account for more than 90% of all mobile game spending by the end of 2013.Īsk Candy Crush Saga critics why the game is so popular and makes so much money, and you'll get a range of answers.

The game has no shortage of critics in the traditional games world, who claim it's a cynical, manipulative cash-grabber of a product, whose sweet-swapping gameplay isn't even that original. This, despite the fact that as King's Tommy Palm explained to The Guardian in September 2013, 70% of Candy Crush players who had reached the last level of the game hadn't spent a penny.Ĭandy Crush Saga's success has been enormous, but also enormously divisive.

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